June 8, 2009

Two years back I happened upon the Global Media Monitoring Project, a survey conducted every five years to determine who makes the news, and who makes it into the news, on the basis of gender. The 2005 iteration of this survey received data from 76 different countries, monitoring 12,893 news stories (radio, TV, and print), including 25,671 sources, and presented by 14,273 news personnel; and the results were profound:

Women are dramatically under-represented in the news

Only 21 percent of news subjects — the people who are interviewed, or whom the news is about — are female. Though there has been an increase since 1995, when 17 percent of those heard and seen in the news were women, the situation in 2005 remains abysmal. For every woman who appears in the news, there are five men.

Women’s points of view are rarely heard in the topics that dominate the news agenda.

There is not a single major news topic in which women outnumber men as newsmakers. In stories on politics and government only 14 percent of news subjects are women; and in economic and business news only 20 percent. Yet these are the topics that dominate the news agenda in all countries. Even in stories that affect women profoundly, such as gender-based violence, it is the male voice (64 percent of news subjects) that prevails. [emphasis mine]
…

As newsmakers, women are under-represented in professional categories

such as law (18 percent), business (12 percent) and politics (12 percent). In reality, women’s share of these occupations is higher. For instance, in Rwanda — which has the highest proportion of female politicians in the world (49 percent) — only 13 percent of politicians in the news are women.

As authorities and experts women barely feature in news stories.

Expert opinion in the news is overwhelmingly male. Men are 83 percent of experts, and 86 percent of spokespersons. By contrast, women appear in a personal capacity — as eye witnesses (30 percent), giving personal views (31 percent), or as representatives of popular opinion (34 percent).
…

Women are more than twice as likely as men to be portrayed as victims:

Now, I have read much in the past two years that confirms women’s issues are not solely the domain of women writers — that men can, in fact, write stories about matters that profoundly affect womankind. Jeffrey Gettleman’s “Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War” was a devastating and desperately needed piece about the under-reported incidence of rape as a weapon of war. Alex Renton’s “The Rape Epidemic” provided an outsider’s account of systemic abuses in Haiti. And for all The Globe and Mail‘s sensationalizing of the case, articles like Robert Matas’ “Week 24: Pickton demonstrated how he strangled prostitutes, witness says” made sure we knew full well who Robert Pickton was, and just how many lives he destroyed.

Moreover, for all the benefits of having a woman talk to other women about sensitive cultural and personal matters, there are the practicalities of a war-torn world to consider, too: Some are simply not safe for foreign women (let alone local women) — and though all journalists can be expected to run grave risks when visiting difficult countries (as Euna Lee and Laura Ling, sentenced to 12 years hard labour in North Korea, recently discovered), those risks are markedly higher for women — both in terms of being targeted in the first place, and in the context of just what can be done to a woman, once targeted. We stand out. We’re generally smaller, with less comparative strength. We can become the personal property of our captors, married off or forced into lives of prostitution. And we can be raped into pregnancy, or else gang-raped for months until we perish. These aren’t just sickening possibilities: they’re maddening ones. And if the gentlemen’s club of inside intel wasn’t enough to make reporting on many parts of the world hard enough, these facts make it damn near impossible to have women representing women with any degree of equality in matters of extremely gendered global conflict.

But as I read yesterday’s cover story for The Toronto Star, “How did 100,000,000 women disappear?” I found myself too numb for anger, too numb for tears. 100 million women — not all lost at birth, no, though so many cultures kill off female children as often as they can; and not all lost from “accidents” inflicted by families forcing the newlyweds’ to pay their dowry debts; and not all lost from violence most heinous and inhuman; but so many lost over the course of a lifetime from basic, gendered neglect, and the prioritization of access to aid to the males instead.

Such sweeping and senseless losses, in such sweeping and senseless numbers, makes the true message of the GMMP all too clear: If our primary coverage of women is as victims, then all we will find are more victims. Many, many, many more victims.

And while there are justifications, yes, for why women do not do more to report on the suffering of fellow women worldwide, there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for why we do not do more to report on the empowerment of women worldwide. It needn’t be so blatant as this; one needn’t write that a woman’s career was a win for all women — but talk, at least, of that career: follow it. Report on it. Introduce more female experts. Cover subjects that preoccupy women throughout the world. It’s not rocket science, but it requires dedication, and patience.

It’s so simple, in fact, it’s almost painful to state it: Women are victims because of how little they are valued, and how easy it is to devalue them.

Change this perception, and you change the world — too late, perhaps, for the 100 million dead and gone in the world today.